Call Me by My Name

by John Ed Bradley

  “Which tree is it tonight?” she asked, getting right to the point.

  Tater pointed to a towering pecan with a large trunk, excellent for privacy. “If you want to spare the tree’s feelings,” he said, “there’s an abandoned outhouse in that overgrown stand of chicken trees on the edge of the pasture. Only problem, last time I stopped by, there was a moccasin coiled up on the seat.”

  Had I wanted Angie to camp with us, I’d have invited her. I didn’t feel like arguing in front of Tater, but she needed to let us know her plans for the night.

  “I told them I was going to a slumber party at Julie’s house,” she said. “There really is one, and I really did go. But I left after an hour and came here.”

  “So you didn’t lie. That’s what you’re saying.”

  “I didn’t lie. No. In the morning, if Mama asks how it went, I’ll tell her—truthfully again—how boring it was and that will be that.”

  “And what about Pops? What will you tell him?”

  “He won’t ask,” she said. “But if he does, I’ll tell him it’s none of his business.”

  She sprayed repellant all over her body, then gave me the bottle to cover her backside. I’d never seen her drink before, and I struggled now with the sight of her holding a Schlitz Tall Boy. Something about her manner smacked of the provocateur, the young rebel wanting to upset the status quo.

  “Pops would blow his top if you talked to him like that,” I said.

  She laughed and slurped her beer. “Then I should make sure to do it.”

  We arranged the quilts around the fire and lay on them with our hands folded behind our heads and stared off at so many stars clotting the sky, it seemed they were one star. We really got after the beer, and we listened to the radio until midnight when KSLO went off the air. It was the only station in town, and we were so far out in the sticks that finding a replacement with good reception wasn’t easy. Tater worked the dial until he found a channel out of Lafayette playing “Layla” by Derek and the Dominos, and he jumped to his feet and reached for Angie’s hand, which she surrendered without hesitation.

  They danced around the fire like a pair of drunk, hungry cannibals gearing up for a late-night repast—yeah, one that basically amounted to each other. In the hot firelight you could see how beautiful they both were. Tater wore hiking boots, jean cutoffs, and a light T-shirt adorned with an Indian warbonnet and the word WARRIORS across the chest. Angie had rolled her white shorts up to the points of her hips, and her halter top, as I’d warned her in a whisper earlier, “just isn’t working hard enough to keep you from spilling out.” Bare feet stamping the grass, she moved without her usual grace, and instead demonstrated that at the core of every smart, pretty girl was a hellion needing only beer and a campfire to set her free.

  “Don’t you wish I’d brought Regina with me?” Angie asked me when the song ended. She fell to the ground in a swoon and lay panting against me. “My brother is in love with Regina Perrault,” she said. Her eyes were closed, and I wasn’t sure if she was making a general statement of fact or edifying Tater on the subject.

  “This explains why the more he drinks, the more he mumbles her name,” he said.

  “I don’t understand genetics,” Angie said. “Whenever I see an attractive girl—Regina is definitely that—I check out her brothers to see what they’re like. I do this because I have such a handsome, desirable twin, and I have this fantasy about the two of us double-dating. Anyway, Regina’s brother, Carl, is a year ahead of us, and he’s just not in her league in the cute department.”

  “I like Carl,” I said. “Good dude.”

  She wasn’t listening. “Because if Rodney ever does pursue Regina, I thought it might be interesting if there was a male equivalent in the Perrault family pour moi. We could keep the twin thing going in perpetuity and have a large wedding ceremony—you know, a two-for-the-price-of-one kind of deal, and save Pops some money. Then Rodney and I could have dinner together every Sunday and stuff like that.”

  “And wear the same clothes,” Tater said. “All four of you.”

  “No more beer for me,” I announced. “No more for you either,” I said to Angie.

  “I don’t think I could hold Carl’s hand, let alone kiss him,” she replied, then threw an arm across my chest and fell asleep.

  I slept too. And when I awoke, hours later, she and Tater were sitting on a quilt a few feet away from me, closer to the fire. Head wildly tumbling from the beer and tequila, I had a hard time comprehending what they were doing, which was so extraordinary I wondered if I was dreaming.

  Tater’s legs were crossed under him, and Angie, positioned behind him, was removing leeches from his body. Fat, black, and glistening, the leeches counted in the dozens, and blood smudged Tater’s skin where they had latched on. As she picked each one off, she flicked it in the fire, making sparks shoot up. The leeches had anchored to the exposed areas of his body, and suddenly it occurred to me that if he had them, I likely had them too. I stood and frantically started brushing my arms and face with my hands. I ran in place, the way we did at football practice, knees pumping high, feet light on the turf. Angie and Tater let me continue for a while before stopping me with laughs. This was the same moment I saw the sun topping the trees and coloring the dirt road that ran on the side of the fields.

  “How long did I sleep?” I asked.

  Angie was working on his upper torso now, her face screwed up in disgust. “Four hours maybe. Five at most.”

  I saw fresh wood on the fire, the blaze stronger than when I fell off.

  I felt poisoned, like I’d substituted the Schlitz with rat killer. “Where’d your little friends come from?” I asked, then lay back and covered my face with my hands.

  “We went swimming in the pond,” Angie said.

  She meant the watering hole where the cows went to drink. Now it was my turn to laugh, despite the load of pain it dropped on my cranium. “The cows do more than just drink in there. At least we have trees to hide behind when we need to do those things.”

  “Oh, God,” she said. “We walked right in it, spent a long time in it.”

  “That explains why the bottom was so soft,” Tater said.

  “Where are your leeches?” I said to her, asking a question that I immediately knew I’d never pose to another human being for as long as I lived.

  “Tater was a gentleman,” she answered. “He insisted on taking mine off first, then I went to work on his.”

  She finished and stood up, and I noticed that she’d wrapped a towel around her middle and knotted it at her waist. Still, a thin trickle of blood ran from her inner thigh past her knee. I wondered if it was the result of a leech’s damage or the beginning of her menstrual cycle. I glanced at Tater. He was checking his legs for more leeches. Hoping to avoid his attention, I held my gaze on the blood on Angie’s leg. She looked down, quickly toweled it off, then fled for the bathroom tree.

  I checked her toiletries to see if she’d come prepared, but there was only facial tissue. I knew her well enough to know that she was as “regular as clockwork,” as I’d heard her say to Mama. It seemed unlikely that she didn’t know her period was coming.

  When she returned to the fire, she was holding the towel in a bundle in her arms. “I’d better go,” she said. “Pops will want the car. And I need a bath in the worst way.”

  “You’ll miss breakfast,” Tater said. “We always scramble eggs.”

  “I don’t want to get in trouble.”

  I stayed on the quilt. Tater gave her a hug good-bye.

  She left with a maelstrom of dust in her wake.

  The baseball season ended in Baker on August 7, when we lost in a regional tournament to the hardest-throwing pitcher in the state. Only Tater, with a pair of singles, was able to hit him. It was my worst day all summer. I grounded out twice and struck out my next time up. After the stri
keout, I threw my helmet from the batter’s box to the dugout in a fit of frustration, and Coach Arnaud pulled me from the game.

  “What is wrong with you?” he asked in front of my teammates. “You’re the last person I’d expect that from.”

  I considered running down the list of things that were wrong with me, beginning with the fact that I couldn’t sleep at night for fear of dreaming about leeches and my sister’s blood, but I preferred to have him think of me as a hothead than a psycho so I apologized and dropped it.

  Angie and I celebrated our seventeenth birthday five days later. It was the same day that two-a-day practices for football began, and Mama and Pops waited to throw us a party until after the afternoon workout was done. A dozen or so classmates showed up, as many of them black as white. Pops never explained why, but he stayed outside the entire time, turning links of pork sausage on the barbecue and sucking on his lumpy cigarettes. Tater and Rubin and the other guys hung out with me in the living room, and the girls helped Mama with the potato salad in the kitchen. Minutes before we sat down to eat, Patrice Jolivette showed up at the front door. She’d driven all the way from Baton Rouge, where she was undergoing freshman orientation at Southern University. Angie was so happy to see her that she broke into tears.

  Angie had told everyone not to bring gifts, but Tater defied her order. He presented us with custom-made T-shirts with a big Oreo cookie on the front of each one. Angie’s shirt was number one and mine was number three. They were both black. “Long live the Oreos!” somebody shouted as we were holding up the shirts. Then Tater made a big production of revealing that he’d come to the party wearing his own Oreo shirt under his dress shirt. It was number two, wouldn’t you know, and it was the same white as the cookie’s cream filling.

  We made po’boys with the barbecued sausage on foot-long tubes of crusty French bread, and each serving of potato salad came with an artful sprinkling of warm, crushed bacon on top. Ever since we were babies Mama had insisted on doubling the candles on the cake, to give each of us a chance to blow out our own, and today’s total came to thirty-four. Angie’s were the pink ones on the right side; mine were the blue on the left. We counted to three and blew in unison and got the job done, and then we annihilated the lemon doberge cake that Mama had baked that morning. Rubin and I ate most of the cake by ourselves. I answered every piece he ate with one of my own.

  “Just another excuse to compete,” I explained to the others.

  “Don’t eat the candles,” Angie said. “They’re made of wax.”

  “Did somebody say candles?” asked Rubin. And this, of course, prompted the two of us to pretend to make a meal of them.

  Pops never did come inside. After he finished cooking he moved his lawn chair away from the hot pit and placed it in front of his garden. Surrounded by tomato plants, a bottle of mosquito repellant at his feet, he was content to stay outside until the guests left. It was almost 10:00 p.m. when I went out and told him we were taking Tater home.

  “He can’t walk?” he said.

  “It’s too far. And we had practice today.”

  “Then don’t be long, Rodney,” he said. He’d stood in barbecue smoke for hours, and he could barely keep his eyes open. “Don’t let your sister—”

  “I won’t, Pops.”

  He was squinting. “Thank you, son.” And he patted me on the shoulder.

  In the truck, Tater sat between Angie and me. We had our first workout tomorrow at 8:00 a.m., and I was already dreading it. The muscles in my legs were sore, and a cramp stabbed my calf every time I lifted my foot to work the clutch. Even worse was how my head felt. It would take a while to get used to wearing a helmet again. We’d just turned left on Dunbar Street, heading toward Parkview Drive, when I heard music approaching from behind us. As always with Smooth, I heard the car before I saw it, and by the time I saw it he was already sitting on my back bumper.

  We crossed the bridge and came to a stop. Smooth revved his engine and pulled up beside us in the next lane. In the night, his car looked sinister, with its white stripes floating against a field of gleaming black, and the darkened windshield reflecting a silvery sky.

  “This ends now,” Tater said. “Let me out.”

  “No!” Angie screamed.

  I turned right onto Parkview, and Smooth turned with us, staying even with the Cameo in the next lane as I worked through the gears and began to pick up speed. The street was quiet tonight and there was no oncoming traffic. He followed us going the speed limit for about a quarter of a mile. Hoping to shake him, I stupidly decided to punch the accelerator and hold it against the floorboard. But the Cameo was no dragster. Smooth stayed with me all the way down the street until he suddenly braked, cut his wheel hard to the right, and pulled up on my tail.

  We now were at the intersection of Bertheaud and Parkview—the corner, it occurred to me, where affluent, white Parkview transitioned to mostly black Railroad Avenue. Smooth couldn’t have been more than a few inches off the back bumper.

  “I’ll teach him,” Tater said. “Come on, Angie. Let me out.”

  Tater made a move to get past her. She blocked him. “No,” she said.

  “Rodney?”

  “No way, brother.” I leaned forward and hugged the wheel. I turned left and crossed the tracks, Smooth still hanging close. I stopped in front of Tater’s house and cracked my door, and the gleaming black car shot past us, its stereo blasting “Patches” by Clarence Carter, a song I’d halfway liked until now.

  He parked in the middle of the street, about sixty yards away, his foot on the brake pedal, lighting the fronts of the little houses, and seemed to be contemplating his next move. We stood huddled outside and waited, as Clarence Carter wailed on:

  “He said Patches

  I’m dependin’ on you, son

  To pull the family through

  My son, it’s all left up to you”

  Then without a word Tater broke from Angie and me and went running toward him. He showed classic form as his knees came up high and his arms pumped close against his ribcage to help him accelerate.

  “No, Tater,” Angie called out. And in that instant Smooth dropped to a shooter’s stance, held a handgun out in front of him, and opened fire. The pop pop pop of the pistol sent me diving against Angie, and I could see Tater fall to the street as I tumbled with her into the weeds. Smooth squeezed off a few more rounds and then was gone, rounding the corner with a squeal of tires, music receding in the night.

  Tater was sitting on the blacktop and feeling his body to make sure he hadn’t been hit. “I’m fine,” he said before we even reached him.

  “Tater . . . Tater . . .”

  “He missed on purpose. They all went over my head.”

  He and Angie held each other. Whimpering and shaking with fear, she ran her hands over his face, and he did the same to hers.

  Along the length of the street, porch lights came on, but nobody stepped outside. The man across from Tater’s house watched us from his front window. I thought how odd we must’ve looked in our Oreo T-shirts, moments after being shot at. I leaned back against the hood and listened for Smooth’s return, but there was nothing: no music and no sounds of a car speeding. “We need to call the police,” I said.

  Tater was standing by the side of the road now, Angie leaning against him. He had his arms around her.

  They’re still together, I thought. They’ve always been together.

  “Can I use the phone in your house?” I said. “Let’s call them.”

  “No,” Tater said. He turned back to me. “It wouldn’t do any good.”

  “The guy just shot at you, and you won’t call the police?”

  “He shot over me, and it wouldn’t help. I can’t count the number of times me and my auntie called them before. Most times we’re lucky if they even show up. No, man, there are other ways to handle it.”

&
nbsp; “Like at the prom? Like how you did it then?”

  Tater patted his chest. “He’s two up on me. It’s my turn next.”

  “I’m with Tater,” Angie said.

  “Yeah, Ang,” I said. “You are, aren’t you?”

  “I mean I agree with him. I don’t see the point in calling the police either. Suppose they send Mr. Charlie again. Is that what you want?”

  They must’ve been pretending all these months. The real reason she hadn’t gone to the prom wasn’t because she hadn’t wanted me to spend the night alone. It was because of Tater. If she couldn’t go with him, she wasn’t going to go with anyone. And Tater’s thing with Patrice? That was all a show too. He’d used her the same way Angie had used Donnie Landry—to give the appearance that it was over between them and they’d moved on, to mollify Pops, and maybe even to get me off their backs.

  I was too tired to argue with them, and besides, Tater was probably right—if the rest of them were anything like Charlie LeBlanc, the cops wouldn’t do.

  My hamstring was starting to tighten up, and I knew I had to get off my feet. “Let’s go home, Angie,” I said.

  “Not yet. Just a little more time, please.”

  “But Pops is waiting.”

  That was all it took.

  On the drive back to Helen Street, I kept checking for Smooth in the rearview mirror, and I saw his ghost car pulling up behind me, even though it wasn’t really there. Still crazier was how I couldn’t get the song “Patches” out of my head.

  “I know you wouldn’t tell Pops,” she said, “but please don’t tell Mama, either. Will you promise me, Rodney?”